"Jessica Lynch labored hard but unsuccessfully to save her best friend, according to Iraqi television videotape shot during the soldiers' captivity in Iraq last spring. The tape, which was never aired in Iraq but has been obtained by NBC News, provides a new look at the treatment the Iraqis gave Lynch and other members of the Army's 507th Maintenance Co. after they were ambushed March 23. Lynch and four other soldiers were rescued by U.S. special forces on April 1, but 11 of their colleagues died during and after the ambush in Nasiriyeh... 'It was a little shocking to see Lori [Pfc. Lori Piestawa, 23, who died after Iraqi doctors failed to stop brain swelling as they treated her for serious injuries.], but it also gave me a little peace to know that they tried, they did their best for her,' said Spec. Shoshana Johnson, 30, of El Paso, Texas. 'I mean, it was obvious they tried to bandage her up and give her medical care.' "

"Relatives have said Army Specialist Greg Lynch Jr. is being deployed to Iraq as part of United States forces in the ongoing operation to restore stability to that region... Lynch acted as a family spokesman to the national media after his sister was rescued April 1 by U.S. forces from an Iraqi hospital in the city of Nasiriyah. He also introduced her before the national media at her return to Wirt County in July and rode with her, in uniform, in a parade through Elizabeth during the homecoming celebration." When Jessica was BushFeld's poster girl, the Pentagon needed Greg at home. But now that Jessica has exposed BushFeld's lies, Greg is getting the Valerie Plame treatment. Impeach Bush Now!

Savaging Private Lynch
13-Nov-03
Jessica Lynch

The Sunday Telegraph reports: "Millions of Americans sat down last weekend to watch one of the television blockbusters of the year. Saving Jessica Lynch, produced by NBC, opened with a vision of US army headlights crawling warily through the Iraqi desert haze on March 23. The next two hours, according to network executives, offered the definitive account of what really happened to Private Lynch after the 507th Ordnance Maintenance convoy was famously ambushed. Few viewers will have taken that promise seriously. After yet another week of conflicting accounts, confused memories and unpleasant revelations, the truth of what happened to Lynch is still as murky as the green-tinged video footage of her rescue from a hospital in Nasiriyah on April 1. In the corridors of the Bush administration, senior officials frankly admit that they would prefer the Jessica Lynch story simply went away. 'The Private Lynch story is becoming a monster,' said one administration official."

Billmon writes that Pvt. Lynch's anger at Bush propagandists "immediately poses a problem for the people who did the manipulating and the exploiting... So now Private Lynch has to be lynched, a job which the vast right-wing conspiracy has taken up with gusto. A reader wrote in yesterday to tell me that attacking Lynch has suddenly become the topic de jour on conservative talk radio: 'One guy just called in and said 'Lynch is a disgrace and proof that women shouldn't be in the military.' One caller says he 'wanted to punch her teeth out.' Caller just said 'She ain't no hero.'' It seems our true-blue hawks, who only a few months ago were insisting Jessica Lynch was an American hero, and that anyone who doubted her story was a stinking terrorist lover, are now telling us that Lynch is a national disgrace, and that anyone who believes her is a stinking terrorist lover. If, as Marx once said, anti-semitism is the socialism of idiots, then clearly, talk radio is the fascism of idiots."

Hooray for Jessica! But What About Shoshana?
08-Nov-03
Jessica Lynch

"On Sunday, NBC will air its made-for-TV movie celebrating Pvt. Jessica Lynch, whose capture and dramatic rescue is the feel-good story of America's war with Iraq. But some African-Americans don't feel so good about Lynch's story. Instead, they ask: What about Shoshana Johnson? Johnson, an Army specialist, belonged to the same 507th Maintenance Company as Lynch. Unlike Lynch, Johnson fought to stave off their Iraqi captors. Like Lynch, she sustained serious injuries. But only Lynch got the headlines, the TV movie, the prime-time television interviews and a biography penned by a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer. Lynch, in short, got the full American celebrity treatment, while Johnson largely got ignored... Suspicions of a racial double standard were reinforced last month when it was revealed that Johnson, who was shot in both ankles, will get only 30% of her monthly pay in disability benefits" while Lynch gets 80%.

Iraqi Doctors Deny Jessica Lynch was Raped
08-Nov-03
Jessica Lynch

"Iraqi doctors who treated former prisoner of war Jessica Lynch dismissed on Friday claims made in her biography that she was raped by her Iraqi captors... Dr. Mahdi Khafazji, an orthopedic surgeon at Nasiriyah's main hospital performed surgery on Lynch to repair a fractured femur and said he found no signs that she was raped or sodomized. Khafazji, speaking at his private clinic in Nasiriyah, said he examined her extensively and would have detected signs of sexual assault. He said the examination turned up no trace of semen... Dr. Jamal al-Saeidi, a brigadier general and head of the orthopedic department at the now disbanded Military Hospital, remembers seeing Jessica's motionless body on a bed in the crowded lobby of his hospital... He said Lynch was fully clothed with her field jacket buttoned up. 'Her clothes were not torn, buttons had not come off, her pants were zipped up,' al-Saeidi said."

Jessica Lynch Blasts Mythmakers and Liars
07-Nov-03
Jessica Lynch

"Jessica Lynch criticized the military for exaggerating accounts of her rescue and re-casting her ordeal as a patriotic fable. Asked by Diane Sawyer if the military's portrayal of the rescue bothered her, Ms. Lynch said: 'Yeah, it does. It does that they used me as a way to symbolize all this stuff. Yeah, it's wrong'... About the reports of her heroism, Ms. Lynch told Ms. Sawyer, 'It hurt in a way that people would make up stories that they had no truth about. Only I would have been able to know that, because the other four people on my vehicle aren't here to tell the story. So I would have been the only one able to say, yeah, I went down shooting. But I didn't.... I don't know why they filmed it, or why they say the things they, you know, all I know was that I was in that hospital hurting. I needed help... From the time I woke up in that hospital, no one beat me, no one slapped me, no one, nothing I'm so thankful for those people, because that's why I'm alive today.'"

PR Watch: "Expect lots of media hype soon over the first Jessica Lynch-related book by Iraqi Mohammed Odeh al-Rehaief. According to some reports he told U.S. Marines the location of the captured Private Lynch. He and his family were then granted U.S. asylum. Along with the chance for U.S. citizenship, al-Rehaief received $300,000 from Rupert Murdoch's Harper Collins for his new book about the Lynch rescue. He also was given a job at the Livingston Group, a high-powered D.C. lobby firm. His book 'Because Each Life Is Precious: Why an Iraqi Man Came to Risk Everything for Pvt. Jessica Lynch' is being promoted by his Livingston Group colleague Lauri Fitz-Pegado. She is infamous for her work at Hill & Knowlton PR in 1990 coaching the Kuwaiti girl called 'Nayirah' in her shocking but phony testimony on Congressional hill that she'd seen Iraqi soldiers murdering Kuwaiti babies. That stunt helped propel the U.S. to war against Iraq in 1991."

"The U.S. Army on Tuesday revealed that all records and documents about the weapons that jammed during the March 23 ambush that led to the death of nine Fort Bliss soldiers were destroyed in the Iraqi attack and that there is no way to trace the weapons' histories. The Army, responding to an El Paso Times request under the Freedom of Information Act, said any official information about the weapons used by Fort Bliss' 507th Maintenance Company was lost on a supply truck taken into combat. Ruben Estrella, father of 18-year-old Pvt. Ruben Estrella-Soto, from El Paso, said he no longer believes anything the Army tells him. 'They told me that my son was shot in the head, and now they are saying that he was struck by a tank,' he said. 'I think the Army or the government is hiding something, but sooner or later the truth will be told.'" Oh well, Jessica Lynch now has a huge book deal. Supposedly, she never had amnesia, merely needed to get her story straight with the Pentagon version.

As the New Pvt. Lynch Memoir Shows, War and Lies Go Hand in Hand
05-Sep-03
Jessica Lynch

"Jessica and disgraced N.Y. Times reporter Rick Bragg just inked a $1 million book deal to tell her nonstory, titled 'I'm a Soldier Too: The Jessica Lynch Story,' not 'Oh My God You Are Such a Sucker for Buying This Book I Mean Wow.'... Look, there is no war without spin. There is no war without outright lying to the populace, without trying to coerce a wary nation into supporting our unprovoked savagery by way of Hollywood-style set pieces performed specifically to deflect attention from the brutality and the decapitated children and the still-dying US soldiers and the burning bodies by the side of the road.... And, hence, we need the sugar. We desperately need the sweet, teary-eyed images of flags and salutes and stunning 'rescues' to make it all go down smoothly, to suppress the collective recoil, the national gag reflex. After all, who wants to see burning babies and crying mothers and hot screaming death on prime time? Show me Old Glory waving in slo-mo! Ahh, that's better."

Jessica Lynch would no doubt have been happy just to have been rescued - regardless of how - and sent home to recover in her hometown. But the Bush Reich continues to use Lynch as a PR chip for its own purposes, engineering "amazing coincidences" that strain even the credibility of even the most gullible. First, her big batch of letters from home finally arrived in the hospital on (military drum roll!) the Fourth of July. Next, her headlining homecoming (see http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2003/07/22/1058853076451.html ) coincides with (gasp!) the alleged killing of Saddam Hussein's sons (after all, a "senior military official" says so!). Knowing Bush-Rove would engineer evidence that led to a war, can anyone doubt the administration would also engineer these latest PR-convenient coincidences?

"This is the third column in as many months devoted in whole or in part to the case of Army Pfc. Jessica Lynch... As I have said before, the issue here is not Lynch, a courageous young soldier who has been through -- and is still going through -- a terrible ordeal. Rather, it is about journalism: about sources and reporters, motivation and manipulation, and finding the truth, as best we can, about a story that became the best known saga of the war in Iraq... The original April 3 story was by staff writers Susan Schmidt and Vernon Loeb. The June 17 reconstruction was by Dana Priest, who also contributed to the April 3 story... The new Post account described itself as a 'more thorough but inconclusive cut at history.' That is accurate. But it did not address the issues that eat away at the trust of large numbers of readers, many of whom have called or e-mailed to complain." As one of Ken Starr's stenographers during the Clinton Wars, Schmidt has a history of journalistic malfeasance.

Jessica Lynch Story is Just Another Bush Lie
22-Jun-03
Jessica Lynch

Nicholas Kristof writes, "I've been roaming Iraq, turning over rocks in my unstinting effort to help the Bush administration find those weapons of mass destruction. No luck yet. But I did find something related, here in the city where it seems (contrary to early Pentagon leaks) that Pfc. Jessica Lynch did not mow down Iraqis until her ammo ran out, was not shot and apparently was not plucked from behind enemy lines by U.S. commandos braving a firefight. It looks as if the first accounts of the rescue were embellished, like the imminent threat from WMD, and like wartime pronouncements about an uprising in Basra and imminent defections of generals. There's a pattern: we were misled... As a citizen, I deeply resent my government trying to spin me like a Ping-Pong ball... The Iraqis misused our prisoners for their propaganda purposes, and it hurts to find out that some American officials were misusing Private Lynch the same way."

"The Post's piece on Lynch is, to the paper's credit, largely a corrective on the Post's own anonymously sourced initial take on her capture and rescue. She wasn't stabbed or shot as first reported. And contrary to the original reporting, Lynch probably did not put up a big fight; she might not have even fired. Her M-16 jammed. Today's piece, unfortunately still citing anonymous sources, also says up high that Lynch was 'mistreated by her captors,' then waits another 65 paragraphs (really) before mentioning that Iraqi doctors dispute that. The doctors also dispute an Iraqi lawyer's recollection that he saw Lynch slapped. 'That's some Hollywood crap you'd tell the Americans,' said one... Iraqi troops had abandoned the hospital the day before and the special ops troops weren't fired upon, didn't fire themselves, and contrary to a mad suggestion in the British press, they weren't shooting blanks. One beef: Today's WP piece downplays the Post's own role in creating the Lynch Media Myth."

"The race to land the most sought-after interview of the war in Iraq intensified as soon as Pfc. Jessica D. Lynch arrived at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center in April, after her rescue from an Iraqi hospital. Katie Couric of NBC News sent Private Lynch, now 20, a bundle of patriotic books, including Rudolph W. Giuliani's memoir, 'Leadership.' Diane Sawyer, of ABC News, sent a locket with a photograph of Private Lynch's family home in Palestine, W. Va. But CBS News, in addition to the usual personal touches, exhibited an apparent new gambit in its pursuit of an exclusive interview with the newsmaker of the moment, known in the television business as 'the get.' In its letters to Private Lynch's family and officials at the medical center, obtained by The New York Times, CBS News combined its pitch for a two-hour documentary with many other projects envisioned by the other divisions of its corporate parent, Viacom." Will the CBS movie use the fictional account of Lynch's rescue?

Pentagon Aims Guns at Lynch Reports
30-May-03
Jessica Lynch

Robert Scheer writes: "It is one thing when the talk-show bullies who shamelessly smeared the last president, even as he attacked the training camps of Al Qaeda, now term it anti-American or even treasonous to dare criticize the Bush administration. When our Pentagon, however --a $400-billion- a-year juggernaut -- savages individual journalists for questioning its version of events, it is worth noting. Especially if you're that journalist.... The distortions concerning Lynch began two days after the rescue with a front-page Washington Post story by veteran reporters Susan Schmidt [a key Ken Starr stenographer] and Vernon Loeb... Despite their current defensiveness, Clarke and other Pentagon honchos had to know that the story attributed to U.S. officials was false because Lynch had at that point already been rescued and examined by U.S. military doctors, who found no evidence of a single gunshot wound, let alone multiple gunshot wounds."

Chicago Sun-Times reports, "Democrats Rahm Emanuel (D-IL) and Jan Schakowsky (D-IL) are disturbed by a BBC documentary called 'Saving Private Jessica: Fact or Fiction?' that claims her daring rescue was not quite what it seemed. 'We need to have an independent inquiry to look at what happened,' said Schakowsky. The Pentagon discounted the BBC report, but Schakowsky said there should be another look. Emanuel, who represents a North Side and suburban district next to Schakowsky's, sent a letter last week to Joseph Schmitz, the Defense Department inspector general, asking for a probe. The letter was co-signed by Rep. Louise Slaughter, a New York Democrat. While Lynch's rescue was 'emblematic of the courage and dedication of our Armed Forces,' states the Emanuel-Slaughter letter, the BBC report raised troubling questions as to whether the rescue was 'a premeditated fabrication. This story and other reports that followed have threatened to tarnish the image of this daring rescue.'"

Saving Private Lynch: Take 2
23-May-03
Jessica Lynch

Robert Scheer writes: "After a thorough investigation, the British Broadcasting Corp. has presented a shocking dissection of the 'heroic' rescue of Pvt. Jessica Lynch, as reported by the U.S. military and a breathless American press. 'Her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived,' the BBC concluded -- the polite British way of saying 'liar, liar, pants on fire.' Though the Bush administration's shamelessly trumped-up claims about Iraq's alleged ties to Al Qaeda and 9/11 and its weapons of mass destruction take the cake for deceitful propaganda -- grand strategic lies that allow the United States' seizure of Iraq's oil to appear to be an act of liberation -- the sad case of Lynch's exploitation at the hands of military spinners illustrates that the truth once again was a casualty of war. Lynch, who says she has no memory of the events in question, has suffered enough in the line of duty without being reduced to a propaganda pawn."

"Jessica Lynch became an icon of the war, and the story of her capture by the Iraqis and her rescue by US special forces became one of the great patriotic moments of the conflict. But her story is one of the most stunning pieces of news management ever conceived... the Pentagon claimed that Lynch had stab and bullet wounds, and that she had been slapped about on her hospital bed and interrogated... But doctors in Nasiriya say they provided the best treatment they could for the soldier in the midst of war. She was assigned the only specialist bed in the hospital and one of only two nurses on the floor... 'I examined her, I saw she had a broken arm, a broken thigh and a dislocated ankle,' said Dr Harith a-Houssona, who looked after her... 'There was no [sign of] shooting, no bullet inside her body, no stab wound - only road traffic accident.'... The Pentagon had been influenced by Hollywood producers of reality TV and action movies, notably Black Hawk Down" -- i.e. Jerry Bruckheimer.

The Real 'Saving Private Lynch'
04-May-03
Jessica Lynch

Mitch Potter writes for the Toronto Star: "Iraqi medical staff tell a different story than U.S. military. 'We all became friends with her, we liked her so much.'"

GE makes the TV's that broadcast the NBC news where Jessica learns about the lack of jobs at home because GE sends them to third world countries ruled by vicious dictators who spend their impoverished citizens' money on old GE weapons they can't afford causing unrest and oppression that NBC supports until GE needs to sell more expensive new weapons to US taxpayers whose children watch NBC commercials to join the Army to get an education in using new GE weapons who fly on GE powered planes to fight the dictators who are turned into demons by NBC news and get wounded and captured and then rescued by other unemployed Justins while NBC cheers as Jessica flies to GE-equipped hospitals where NBC takes more pictures with GE cameras and broadcasts the images on NBC networks to boost their sagging ratings and make TV movies to inspire another Jessica to join the Army to use the next generation of GE weapons against the next third-world dictator GE is currently selling weapons...